Seeing the articles posted on the club site featuring Napoleonics miniatures have made me want to return to the project. I've been working on a 1:10 figure scale recreation of Lundy's Lane in 28mm using Republic to Empire rules. It's a huge project (although less now that I've improved my painting speed since I last worked on it) which I call my "Retirement Project" because I hope to have it finished by the time I retire.

Anyway with my renewed interest in 1812, a desire to play inside of 10 years and the recent enthusiasm for Saga I've come up with the idea that a Saga-style Napoleonic Skirmish game would be useful. I'm looking to see if it already exists. Certainly I am not the only one to have thought of it.

My only real requirement is being able to use multi-based troops in a skirmish game but this was what I was thinking:

Elite, Regular, Levy unit types. Depending on the nation and your personal prejudices you could say British Flank Companies are Elite, Line Infantry are Regular and militia are Levy. 4, 8, 12 for one point like Saga.

Shooting causes fatigue in the same way as melee in Saga, except only for the person shooting. This represents reloading muskets and the effectiveness of early volleys, except you can also rest like Saga which is the company taking the time to load properly.

Melee - Things get more complicated here. My favorite part of Republic to Empire is how a charge either breaks the defender or attacker before melee is joined which fits my understanding that the majority of bayonet wounds were taken to the back since there were relatively few actual melees. For example, at the Battle of Lundy's Lane the two sides were so close that the plumes of flames from their muskets were said to mingle with those of the enemy yet no-one charged. Anyway, I don't really have rules for that other than. Perhaps something which compares amount of fatigue, or you roll X dice and spend your opponent's fatigue to add to your dice pool. Loser breaks, takes casualties, makes a flee move and is exhausted.

Battleboards would come last and would take the most work. I'd probably start with a bunch of generic abilities and start tweaking for national characteristics. For example, there should be a rally order which removes a bunch of fatigue near the "warlord", a form square order to stand against cavalry (which don't break when failing charges), a lie down order to reduce the effectiveness of enemy shooting, etc. National characteristics, off the top of my head, would be a British order to avoid taking fatigue when making a shooting attack and a french order to form battle column which discards some fatigue when making a charge order.

Anyway, the summarize, I'm hoping to find some set of rules which lets me start playing with 30-60 figures but allows me to multi-base so I'm still working towards my main project. Failing that I'm going to see if I can find someone working on a Napoleonic conversion for Saga. Failing that I'm going to work on one assuming some of our Napoleonics players are interested. I think everyone bases in 4s while I base in 8s.

And while I've shown these here before I'm going to show them again if only because looking at them increases my motivation to go paint some more.

So I dug out my old box of Victrix to see where I was at, and then pulled out what I've already painted. Turns out I have 18 muskets, 2 colours, 1 officer and 1 colour guard sergeant painted leaving just 10 muskets, 2 company sergeants with muskets, 1 colour guard sergeant, 1 officer and 4 drummers to paint and my first unit is actually finished. I was surprised how close I was to finishing. When I last painted figures for this unit the best speed I could manage was 4 a week so this will make an interesting change.

Time to see if I can dig up my notes on my old napoleonic project to see if I can find the OOB I'd planned.